This is so funny! You probably don't know Chinese and hasn't seen much content of any Chinese language naval forum. Here is the story:
I believe it was in 2008, when the 167 Shenzhen visited Japan. And one Japanese military geek blogger went on board and did a blog post about his experience. He was pissed that there are "wooden doors" and "floor matts" inside, and said that these are terrible fire hazards. So his post got spread around extensively in Chinese military forum, and the PLA fans in China was even more pissed and demands an answer.
I believe it was 《军事纪实》of the CCTV-7 Channel that finally did a show (in 2012, 2013 I believe) explaining the practice and even showing that those doors and floor matts are made of fire proof materials. They even demonstrated this by torching the door and floor matts with a blow-torch.
The reason they did this was because it was seen as a very comforting environment for sailors onboard. Seeing the wooden color of doors and having floor matts to walk on. This is basically a Chinese navy culture now.
Yepp, but the Japanese guy in 2008 didn't know about that. To him, the floor matts as well as the "wooden" doors are fire hazards.
it’s not the appearance of wood. Anything can be painted to look like wood. In most warships, doors to any watertight bulkhead will not be just a plain door, they will have clamps, dogs, quick acting levers or hand wheels or other means of quickly securing them against up to 1 atmosphere of excess pressure from either side
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